Every Marvel Cinematic Universe TV Show, Ranked (2025)

March 7, 2025

• ‘Inhumans’ (ABC, 2017)

  

  With the X-Men’s film rights at the time belonging to Fox, Marvel in the 2010s spent a lot of time and effort trying to turn the Inhumans — an alien race who made interesting Fantastic Four supporting characters and were almost always forgettable on their own — into the new X-Men, in both comics and onscreen. But comics readers never invested in the idea of the Inhumans superseding mutants. Marvel’s film team couldn’t find a way to make a movie about them work, and ultimately the property fell into the hands of a bunch of people on the TV side who didn’t seem to know or care about what was compelling about the group. Worse, they didn’t even have the budget to properly convey the Inhumans’ weird powers and appearances —by far their biggest hook — for very long. Serinda Swan’s Medusa, with powerful, prehensile hair, was forced by an opponent to get a buzzcut. Adorable teleporting dog Lockjaw was taken out of action quickly. The freakish Gorgon (Eme Ikwuakor) wore boots to cover his horse-like hooves. And so on. Shortly before the first two episodesdebuted on ABC, they were released in IMAX theaters —an oddly huge format for such a small, pointless project.

• ‘Iron Fist’ (Netflix, 2018)

  

  All six of Marvel’s interconnected Netflix shows had certain problems in common, not the least of which was a perpetual struggle to keep intensely serialized stories interesting over the span of as many as 13 episodes per season. But the others at least benefited from charismatic stars who were playing characters with clear goals and inner battles. Iron Fist, unfortunately, had a complete black hole at the middle in the form of Finn Jones, who parlayed a small role on Game of Thrones into a star vehicle for which he was utterly unprepared. For starters, he was playing a master of martial arts, yet had no real experience with fighting himself. Combine his modest screen presence with his struggle to be convincing in even the most elementary and bland fight choreography, and you’ve got the nadir of Marvel’s Netflix experiment.

• ‘Secret Invasion’ (Disney+, 2023)

  

  This tedious alien invasion drama was the thanks Samuel L. Jackson got for spending 15 years as the glue holding the entire MCU together? A lifeless, humorless Cold War allegory about feuding factions among the shape-changing Skrull alien race, Secret Invasion made poor use of almost everyone involved —including giving Cobie Smulders, as Fury’s longtime lieutenant Maria Hill, an abrupt, underwhelming death. Near the end, Emilia Clarke’s G’iah received the combined powers of nearly every other MCU hero, which would make her all but impossible to write for going forward, if anyone actually cared enough Secret Invasion to bring her back.

• ‘The Defenders’ (Netflix, 2017)

  

  The Defenders was meant to be the moment Netflix’s entire Marvel line had been building towards: a street-level version of the Avengers, filled with characters that Marvel assumed the audience had grown to love in their solo series. That last part worked well enough for three of the four (see Iron Fist), but somehow Defenders turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. It completely wasted the great Sigourney Weaver as a red herring villain. As a continuation of story ideas from Iron Fist and Daredevil Season Two, it never seemed to know what to do with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. And despite only being eight episodes compared to the 13-episode seasons for the solo shows, it somehow felt even more padded.

• ‘Moon Knight’ (Disney+, 2022)

  

  In the comics, Moon Knight has long been a character where the idea of him —and/or the cool, all-white costume designed by artist Don Perlin —is almost always more exciting than the execution. The TV adaptation continued this trend. Star Oscar Isaac seemed to have a lot of fun playing the mentally ill hero’s multiple alter egos, but the show otherwise got bogged down in a lifeless storyline tied to his roots in Egyptian mythology. And it’s almost shocking how little Ethan Hawke was given to do as the bad guy.

• ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ (Disney+, 2021)

  

  The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was actually the first of Marvel’s Disney+ shows to begin filming, but rewrites and other postproduction delays meant it didn’t premiere until after WandaVision. This was probably for the best. Outside of a riveting supporting performance by Carl Lumbly as a forgotten Captain America successor from the Korean War, this attempt to follow Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan as the title characters in the wake of Steve Rogers’ retirement was a muddle —unsure of what it was about, what it wanted to say, or even whether temporary Cap fill-in John Walker (Wyatt Russell) was supposed to be a toxic male supervillain or just an amusingly misunderstood antihero. There were some nice action set pieces at the start, but even those petered out by the time we got to a finale where it was difficult to even see what was happening in the climactic fight scenes.

• ‘The Punisher’ (Netflix, 2017-19)

  

  The Punisher was never part of Marvel’s Netflix plan, which was meant to stick to shows about the four members of the Defenders. But Jon Bernthal jumped off the screen in Daredevil Season Two as deadly vigilante Frank Castle, and was rewarded with his own spinoff. Still, in comics and onscreen, the relentless but also relentlessly grim Frank has tended to work best as a supporting player in other people’s stories, and that proved the case, here, too. The first season at least gave him an interesting verbal sparring partner in a pre-The Bear Ebon Moss-Bacharach. And Bernthal alone is electric enough to elevate Punisher out of the bottom area of the list. But its leading man aside, it represented many of the flaws of the Netflix era without most of the highs the other shows sometimes hit.

• ‘Echo’ (Disney+, 2024)

  

  In the new less-is-more era of the MCU, it’s hard to imagine a show like Echo — with Alaqua Cox reprising her role as Maya Lopez, a secondary villain from Hawkeye, now trying to be a force for good upon returning to her Oklahoma roots —being made. And there were certain bumpy aspects, not least of which were its attempt to simultaneously be the launch of a new “Marvel Spotlight” imprint, meant for shows where you didn’t have to have a master’s degree in Marvel lore to follow, even as it continued multiple stories from Hawkeye and Daredevil. But Cox was an interesting, if raw, screen presence, the action was stronger and more creative than in many of the Disney+ series, and the dual emphasis on Maya’s Native American heritage and her disabilities (like Cox, Maya is deaf and has an artificial leg) made Echo feel distinct and homespun at a moment when the MCU as a whole had started to feel very generic and factory-assembled.

• ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ (Disney+, 2024)

  

  Blind attorney/vigilante Matt Murdock escapes the limbo in which he was stranded with all the other Netflix heroes. But this attempt to unite multiple eras of Marvel TV can’t quite overcome how easy it is to see the seams holding together the work of two different sets of showrunners. When it’s good — in the fight scenes, in verbal showdowns between Matt (Charlie Cox) and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), or Matt and Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) —Born Again at least evokes the better moments of its predecessor.(And in an entertaining standalone episode where an uncostumed Daredevil foils a bank robbery, it even suggests the kind of self-contained episode these shows should try much more often.) But between the whiplash of the competing creative teams, and often leaden pacing evoking the weaker parts of all the Netflix shows, it’s mid-tier at best.

• ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ (ABC, 2013-2017)

  

  The birthplace of MCU-adjacent television, and also a test case for how messy that can get. Co-created by Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen, the series resurrected Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson after Loki appeared to kill him in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, and the idea was for Coulson’s team to interact regularly with characters and story ideas from the film. But the movie division rarely seemed interested in helping out their TV siblings, and in many early episodes, Agents was all but indistinguishable from episodes of NCIS airing at the same time on a rival network. Then, to make matters even more complicated, the entire premise of the series got blown up late in its first season when Captain America: The Winter Soldier revealed that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been taken over by Hydra and then dismantled. The series went through various reinventions, including its own failed attempt to make people care about the Inhumans. Eventually, all involved figured out that the show’s one-sided relationship with the films wasn’t really worth the effort (by the time of Avengers: Infinity War, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was essentially taking place in a parallel reality where Thanos never snapped his fingers), and began having fun with the motley collection of heroes they had assembled, including Ming-Na Wen as martial artist Melinda May, and Chloe Bennet as the superpowered Daisy Johnson. Never a great show, but one that had some entertaining stretches across seven seasons — a run that seems unlikely for any of its streaming successors to equal.

• ‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’ (Disney+, 2022)

  

  Going all the way back to Tony Stark bantering with his military escort at the start of the first Iron Man film, the MCU has been a pretty jokey place. So there was a risk that building a straightforward sitcom around Tatiana Maslany as Bruce Banner’s superstrong cousin, lawyer Jennifer Walters, wouldn’t feel different enough from the level of wisecracking found in Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok. And for the most part, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law trended more towards smile-inducing gags rather than ones that led to explosive laughter. But between Jen’s fourth wall-breaking awareness that she’s the main character on an MCU show, and the specific strain of humor about the challenges of being a woman in a field dominated by men —both onscreen and in the audience —She-Hulk carved a distinct, appealing niche for itself. Plus, Charlie Cox was so incredibly charming with Maslany when Daredevil came out west for a few episodes, it was almost disappointing to see him back in angst-ridden mode for Born Again.

• ‘Ms. Marvel’ (Disney+, 2022)

  

  The first batch of Disney+ shows involved giving TV spotlights to supporting characters from MCU movies. As Kamala Khan, superhero fangirl turned superhero herself, Iman Vellani was such an instant delight that Khan became the first Disney+ character to take the opposite journey; The Marvels has flaws, but Vellani very much is not one of them. Her small-screen adventure was, like several shows on this list, elevated more by her performance than by the story around her, particularly whenever it dealt more with Khan’s connections to an extradimensional race. But when Ms. Marvel was content to be a coming-of-age story, and to deal specifically with Kamala trying to reconcile her Pakistani heritage with her super-ambitions, it was a treat.

• ‘Luke Cage’ (Netflix, 2016-18)

  

  The first seven episodes of the first Luke Cage season, starring Mike Colter as the bulletproof hero of Harlem, are pure dynamite, thanks in large part to Mahershala Ali’s riveting turn as Cage’s chief rival, Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes. But the show inexplicably killed off Cottonmouth, and never really recaptured the magic of the Colter vs. Ali dynamic. The series had a fantastic hip-hop soundtrack, often used to score action sequences taking advantage of its hero’s size and indestructability. It also very badly could have used a few self-contained episodes near the start of each season to alleviate one of the more sluggish paces of any of the Netflix shows. Cage was first introduced in the comics as a “hero for hire.” Why did the show never bother to give us that idea in action, so the season-long arcs didn’t run out of steam well before each finale?

• ‘Hawkeye’ (Disney+, 2021)

  

  This team-up of two master archers ironically took modest aim compared to many of its Disney+ contemporaries —going for simple buddy comedy, crisp action, and Christmastime vibes — but expertly hit its targets. Jeremy Renner, given license to be looser than he is as the Avengers’ sixth banana, meshed well with Hailee Steinfeld’s overeager Kate Bishop. And the two Hawkeyes were given a colorful rogues’ gallery, including Kingpin, Echo, an army of tracksuited goons calling everyone “bro,” and Florence Pugh’s delightful Yelena Belvova from Black Widow. The episode built around a long car chase — and a very large arrow —remains a highlight of the whole Disney+ era.

• ‘Agatha All Along’ (Disney+, 2024)

  

  Just as WandaVision was a salute to sitcoms where every episode took the shape of a vintage TV-comedy, its long-delayed spinoff was a salute to Nineties fantasy and sci-fi shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which knew how to use old-fashioned Monster of the Week stories to advance a larger story arc. Here, Kathryn Hahn’s long-lived witch turned nosy neighbor Agatha Harkness teams up with Billy (Joe Locke) —a.k.a. the soul of one of Scarlet Witch’s magically-created sons —and a coven of other fallen witches on a mission to get their powers back. Each episodehas a distinct objective, and a different genre vibe (rom-com one week, slasher movie the next), but all in service of answering big questions about exactly who Billy is, what Agatha really wants, and whether the other witches are fools for trusting her for even a moment. It’s unclear whether Billy will one day team up with Kamala Khan, Kate Bishop, and the other second-generation Avengers, or if Agatha will wind up as the end of a particular phase of Marvel TV. But if it’s the latter, what an exciting, funny, sad, creative way to go out.

• ‘Loki’ (Disney+, 2021-23)

  

  As the only live-action Disney+ MCU show so far to get two seasons, Loki is a tricky one to rank. Its first season, in which a variant of Tom Hiddleston’s Norse trickster god gets wrapped up in a time-traveling bureaucracy, and partners with Owen Wilson’s easygoing time cop Mobius, has a good argument to be near the top of the Marvel television rankings — maybe at the top. It was inventive, audacious, and took great advantage of the extra time spent getting to know a character who had already appeared in so many movies. The second season was mostly a dud, though, getting too caught up in both technobabble and the multiversal slog that’s been a problem for much of Marvel post-Endgame. Averaged out, let’s put the two seasons here.

• ‘Jessica Jones’ (Netflix, 2015-19)

  

  At its best, Jessica Jones — starring Krysten Ritter as a bitter failed superhero coping with the trauma of having been enslaved and raped by the mind-controlling Kilgrave (David Tennant) —went to emotional places so raw and potent, it made most of the rest of the MCU feel like kids’ stuff. But it’s also the most glaring example of the pacing problems that come with devoting one season to a purely serialized story. Because Jessica and Kilgrave couldn’t have their final showdown until the first-season finale, the plot had to take several idiotic twists —one involving Kilgrave being improbably freed by an angry mob of many of the other people who survived his monstrous powers —in order to delay the inevitable confrontation. And then once Kilgrave was eliminated, later seasons struggled to find opponents whose conflicts with Jessica could justify even half the time devoted to the biggest of her bads.

• ‘Agent Carter’ (ABC, 2015-16)

  

  As Peggy Carter, spirited British spy and Steve Rogers’ WWII crush in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Hayley Atwell made such a strong impression that she was given her own spinoff, set in the war’s aftermath. Meant as something of a companion to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — Peggy worked for SSR, a precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. — Agent Carter immediately established its own charming identity as a period adventure that took advantage of Atwell’s retro vibes (aided by fabulous Forties fashions), her easy interplay with James D’Arcy as butler turned spy Edwin Jarvis, and Peggy’s knack for outmaneuvering male colleagues and opponents who underestimated her because of her gender. Agent Carter was the only show of the pre-Kevin Feige era of Marvel television that the movie people had much involvement in or affection for. Not coincidentally, Peggy kept returning in the films at a time when they were otherwise ignoring what was happening on the small screen, and she even wound up as part of the emotional climax of Avengers: Endgame. That was bittersweet, since, depending on which of that film’s writers you ask, Steve and Peggy’s reunion may have erased the events of Agent Carter. But even if it never “happened,” it’s still there to stream.

• ‘Daredevil’ (Netflix, 2015-18)

  

  The original incarnation of Daredevil wasn’t perfect, suffering from the same pacing issues as its Netflix peers, particularly in a second season that largely did without Vincent D’Onofrio’s mesmerizing work as the Kingpin. But it was easily the most consistently good show of the pre-Feige period. And it had enough highs in its performances, and, especially in some of the most jaw-dropping fight sequences ever put on television, to rank it ahead of all but one of the shows made by the current regime.

• ‘WandaVision’ (Disney+, 2021)

  

  Is WandaVision at the top of our list of the best Marvel television shows because it was about television? Not really, although devoting each episode to pastiches of shows like The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, and Malcolm in the Middle did provide a valuable structural foundation that so many Marvel shows before or since have lacked. Mainly, WandaVision is here because it was the most effective of all of these shows at finding a deep and resonant emotional truth within the metaphorical context of witches and synthezoids and children who only exist in the imagination of their magically-powered mother. Plus, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” continues to set the highest of bars for any succeeding Marvel series to match in poetic succinctness.